50 karma · joined October 9, 2018
Many of the insights of economics seem to be
qualitative, with many fewer reliable quantitative laws.
However a series of power laws in economics do count as
true and nontrivial quantitative laws—and they are not
only established empirically, but also understood
theoretically.
I will start by providing several illustrations of
empirical power laws having to do with patterns involving
cities, firms, and the stock market. I summarize some of
the theoretical explanations that have been proposed.
I suggest that power laws help us explain many economic
phenomena, including aggregate economic fluctuations.
I hope to clarify why power laws are so special, and to
demonstrate their utility.
In conclusion, I list some power-law-related economic
enigmas that demand further exploration.
In my (biased) opinion, it is a very good introduction to the _economy_, though it is perhaps too light on _economics_ [0]. That is to say, it is much, much better than other introduction-to-economics textbook at presenting the relevant facts about the economy but is a bit light on analytical tools. If one wants to go beyond this textbook, they would have to learn them. If I were to offer a comparison, CORE econ is to traditional econ textbook what a natural history of the universe book might be to a physics textbook: many more topics covered including those that would not be addressed in an intro textbook but less studying of models.
Hopefully, if it catches on, we will hear fewer people arguing "Well, it is just basic economics that X" where X is something that it true in the toy model of econ 101 that is useful for learning but not really in real life.
I would suggest completing this book with some econometrics - since it is those tools that allow us to (try to) see which theories may be right and which may be wrong. The books by Pischke & Angrist are good: "Mastering Metrics", and at a higher level, "Mostly Harmless Econometrics".
The Journal of Economic Perspectives [1] is a great resource to learn more about a topic in economics. As it says: > The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) fills the gap between the general interest press and academic economics journals.
The HN crowd would also most likely like the Quantitive Economics lectures [2] from Sargent & Stachurski.
[0] It is also a low density textbook, which seems to be common in American textbook
But if it is not the case, and lowering your price only wins you _some_ but not all customers, then there is no reason to expect that the price point that balance gaining new customers vs selling each product for less will be equal to the marginal cost and not above.
Let's say your "strength" is simply the sum of the value of your pieces. The losing side has a strength of l and the winning side has a strength of L.
The losing side loses by l-L in absolute terms, or (l-L)/(l+L) in relative terms.
An even exchange of value k makes it go to (l-k)-(L-k) = l-k in absolute terms (no change); and to (l-L)/(l+L-2k) in relative terms. (l-L)/(l+L-2k) < (l-L)/(l+L).
To take an example, if the situation is white : two pawns and black: one pawn, going to white: one pawn and black: nothing is a bad deal for black (the losing side)!
[0] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/901/1/MPRA_paper_901.pdf
The first version, T1, did the secure enclave thing, and controlled Touch ID, thermal and power management and a few other things.
The second version, the T2, added storage management, an image signal processor, an audio controller, and encryption for the SSD.
The next version will probably do even more things.
It seems to me that the most likely scenario is the T* chip being used for more and more things and the amd64 chip to be used for less and less things until the amd64 chip is more a "hardware acceleration" chip, like GPUs, here to handle specific tasks to be offloaded from the (now ARM) CPU.
The shift from amd64 as the _central_ processing unit to the T* chip does not need to be a clear cut (ditching the intel cpu directly and using the T* chip for everything) but can (and is) being done progressively (the T chips becoming more and more capable).
SparkleShare creates a special folder on your computer.
You can add remotely hosted folders (or "projects") to
this folder. These projects will be automatically kept
in sync with both the host and all of your peers when
someone adds, removes or edits a file.
SparkleShare uses the version control system Git under
the hood, so setting up a host yourself is relatively
easy. Using your own host gives you more privacy and
control, as well as lots of cheap storage space and
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- According to the Cour de Cassation, it is both a tax and a social contribution - According to the Conseil Constitutionnel, it is a tax - According to the Conseil d'Etat and the EUCJ, it is a social contribution
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contribution_sociale_g%C3%A9n%...
Slightly off topic but for foreigners who are interested, the welfare state (called Social Security, the word thus a much broader sense than in the US context) in France has been created as a separate entity from the Government.
It is managed by workers' representatives and employers' representatives. Since, in the end, it is the Governement (the Parliament, to be exact) that make laws, including those related to the Social Security, it has as much power over this sytem as it wants.
Nonetheless, this leads France to have technically two different budgets - the Government one and the Social Security one - with their own bills and two systems of taxation - social contributions, which go to the Social Security budget; and taxes, which go to the Government budget.
OVertime, social contributions - which are computed on labor income - have been cut, especially for low wage earners. The shortfall in financing has been partly compensated by transferring tax revenues to the Social Security.
This leads to weird public accounting and public debate: for instance, there is much talk about the Social Security deficit or even specific branches of the Social Security (since they are all financed by their social contribution), missing the fact that it reflects completely arbitrary ways to earmarked specific taxes to different part of the Government.
Another example of weirdness in the public debate because of this is the enormous importance of the "income tax" in the public debate, and especially that few households pay it and most of the money comes from a minority of household ... but the "income tax" actually brings _less_ money than the CSG, which is a tax on income that is different thatn "the income tax" (impôt sur le revenu). Because of the names and the arbitrary accounting practices, the vast majority of income taxation is completely out of the public debate radar.
That public spending is c. 55% of GDP does not mean that private spending is 45% of GDP, since private + public spending does not equal GDP. Back of the envelope computations put private spending at 265% of GDP [0].
> if she is hired now, there is a good probability that she will have only a little retirement pension in 40 years, even if the law does not change. (probably close to the minimum salary, at least I hope so). So all this considerable amount of money will be wasted in the state and the "sécurité sociale" deep pockets.
It is hard to understand how French people can both have "very low" pensions and then be one of the country that spend the most on pensions as a share of GDP [1], and have retirees richer than working people [2, p5.]
[0] https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-chez-les-economistes-a...
[1] A fancy expression to say "using programming to solve economic models"
This is a shame because economics is already a computational discipline and increasingly so. It can be of interest to the HN crowd.
There is an awful lot of programming done by people that are not professional programmers. As an economist myself, I think code have become so central to our profession that we can no longer afford to ignore software engineering best practices. Conversely, there may be quite a few topics in computational economics that interest programmers.
For instance, an awful lot of macroeconomics - including to an extent Romer's sub-field, endogenous growth theory - is essentially programming in Dynare [0] and doing computer simulations.
Nordhaus got the prize for developing (quite basic, actually) simulation models that integrate the economic systems and environmental systems. See for instance there [1].
Micro-simulation is of course a big area where programming and economics meet - you can follow development on github [2, 3]. This is code that has an enormous impact on society, as it is used as a basis to evaluate the effects of policies.
Econometrics, aka statistics for economics, is also a big area where programmers could contribute to economic research. There is a big push to adapt ML techniques to solve economists' problems, eg Athey's research [4].
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/williamdnordhaus/dice-rice
[2] https://github.com/openfisca